-- Several news organizations have recently profiled 70-year-old Charlotte Chambers, who is a reserve defensive back for the Orlando Starz of the Independent Women's (tackle) Football League. Said the Starz' chief executive: "Last year, I thought I should tell the other teams to go easy and not hit her too hard. But now I'm afraid she's going to hurt somebody." Said the 5-foot-4, 140-pound Chambers: "I say, 'You better hit me (first), because I'm laying you out.'"

-- An industry has sprung up in the last year or two in New York City: advisers who counsel parents on how to get their 3-year-olds accepted at prestigious nursery schools (which gives them a leg up in being accepted at prestigious kindergartens and then prestigious private schools). According to a May New York Times report, advisers charge as much as $300 an hour or a flat $3,000 to give tips, which parents justify because a full, 14-year ride in private schools can cost $300,000. Top-of-the-line Columbia Grammar, for example (one of the "Baby Ivies"), recently had more than 500 kindergarten applicants for 34 open slots.

(1) "From Hyenas' Privates, a Potential Public Good" (a May Contra Costa Times report on how both male and female hormones flow through hyenas' genitals, in part shaping them, which scientists say offers clues in how to treat potentially hermaphroditic humans). (2) "Psychologists Dissect the Multiple Meanings of Meow" (a May Cox News Service report on how cats may display many alterations of their standard vocalization depending on why at that time they want humans' attention). (3) "15 Injured in Kite Contests" (a report from Britain's Independent TV on competitions featuring contentious Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat, India, in which aggressive participants use twine coated with powdered glass).

-- In May, 36-year-veteran ambulance driver Mike Ferguson, rushing a liver for transplant from Leeds to Cambridge, England, on the A1 highway, was ticketed for doing 104 mph. In fact, Ferguson was ticketed by two jurisdictions that night, but Cambridgeshire police dismissed the ticket after Ferguson's explanation while Lincolnshire police sent the case to prosecutors even after the explanation, and at press time, a court date was being set.

-- The Florida Legislature finally amended its open-government law in May to prohibit sex-crime inmates from getting access to photographs of their victims. Under the previous version of the law, a state appeals court had ruled that convicted sex-assaulter Dale W. Weeks was entitled, under the liberal public-records procedures, to investigative photos that depicted his victim's genitals.

-- The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned the "armed robbery" conviction of Deshon Rene Odom in May, saying that even though Odom had a gun in his waistband, he hadn't meant for anyone at the bank he was robbing to see it, and therefore that he was not legally "armed." The court said that the federal law speaks only of using a gun, not carrying one; on the other hand, the court acknowledged that if Odom had waved around a toy gun that looked real, that would be enough for "armed" robbery.

-- A 70-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman pleaded no contest to public indecency in New Philadelphia, Ohio, in June after their arrest for engaging in sex acts in a booth at a Hardee's restaurant. Though it was the couple's first lewdness charge, the prosecutor told the judge that it was not the first time they had done something like that.

-- Ken Rohrer, an elementary school principal in Michigan City, Ind., resigned in April, two weeks after he had (apparently as a joke) decided to appear on the school's classroom TV system making his daily announcements while portraying an Iraqi character, denouncing "lying" Americans and the Bush administration and charging that the upcoming school ice cream social would be held as scheduled, even though Iraqis were starving.

-- A joint resolution commissioning a statue to recognize the anti-abortion movement in South Carolina is currently making its way through the state House of Representatives. In the original proposal in circulation until May, the statue that sponsors thought would best celebrate unborn children was to be a huge (6-foot-tall) fetus. (Some supporters have suggested an alternative design.)

Recently, police, faced with thieves whom they suspected had swallowed their contraband in order to avoid detection, had to wait and let nature take its course in order to recover the incriminating evidence. Carpet cleaner Daniel Dyament, 19, finally expelled (after 72 hours) the $3,000 ring he allegedly stole from a customer's home in Bloomfield Township, Mich. (June). And in March, Chicago police reportedly used White Castle "sliders" to coax suspect Peter J. Mannix to yield (after 96 hours) a stolen $37,000 diamond. But in Santa Cruz, Calif., jeweler Joy Kilner concluded in June after days of waiting that the $1,800 diamond that her pet basset hound swallowed was not coming out and was probably stuck in the dog's intestines.

-- Davidson County (Tenn.) judge Ellen Hobbs rejected the death-row appeal of murderer Abu-Ali Abdur Rahman, 52, scheduled for June 18, ruling that the state's lethal-injection cocktail is constitutional, even though one of the three drugs involved (Pavulon) is banned in Tennessee for animal euthanasia. And a congressional committee staff revealed in May that five U.S. companies that have relocated their headquarters offshore in order to avoid federal taxes were nonetheless awarded a total of nearly $1 billion of taxpayer money in federal government contracts over the last fiscal year.

In May, Reuters reported on the increasing popularity in Australia of large cockroaches as pets (won't hurt children, very low maintenance). However, at about the same time, health authorities in Thailand decided to confiscate and destroy about 1,000 pet cockroaches, calling them pests, but reluctantly showed sympathy for the owners' losses by holding a Buddhist funeral rite for the cockroaches. And a few days before that, artist Catherine Chalmers opened her "Executions" exhibit in New York City, featuring photographs of cockroaches dying simulated "human" deaths (hanging from tiny nooses or executed in a small prison electric chair) and, in a video, arising from the "dead" in a gas chamber (gruesomely knocked out by carbon dioxide, then revived as the gas dissipates).

In 2000, News of the Weird reported on neuroscientist Lawrence Farwell's "brain fingerprinting" (in which he says he can measure brain activity or inactivity in order to determine whether a person has previously experienced an event or a setting, such as a murder scene). According to a May 2003 Associated Press story, University of Pennsylvania scientists are testing devices that detect brain activity in order to determine whether a person is about to lie even before he or she has spoken a word. Biophysicist Britton Chance's headband measures blood-flow; psychologist Daniel Langleben uses a type of MRI machine; and other researchers employ devices like heat-sensitive cameras to measure telltale blood-flow around the eyes.

Convicted underwear thief Ronald Ernst (whose record includes 16 previous lewdness-related charges), filed a lawsuit against a police detective and two attorneys for calling too much attention to his case (Fargo, N.D.). Australia's Federal Court rebuffed the Tax Office and ruled that convicted heroin dealer Francesco Dominico La Rosa could reduce his 1995 taxable income to allow for A$224,000 that he said had been stolen from him in a drug deal gone bad. And officials in Berryville, Ark., were perplexed at a wave of finely crafted counterfeit money passed around town but only bills in the seldom-seen denomination (for bogus bills) of $1.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- No state has had more serious budget anxiety attacks recently than Oregon, which saw some public schools close early this year after running out of money. However, another crisis surfaced in April when death-row inmate Horacio Reyes-Camarena told prison officials he would reluctantly accept the kidney transplant that would save Oregon taxpayers most of the $120,000 a year they now pay for his dialysis (and must, by law, pay until his execution, which may be as long as 10 years away, because of appeals). Some law-abiding Oregon kidney patients are being turned down for transplants because post-transplant drugs are too expensive.

-- Just as Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham's daily, quirky, minutely detailed, written diaries are in the news (e.g.,"6:50-7:00 - Apply scalp medication"), the Pentagon was seeking bidders for contracts to create electronic "diaries" (the LifeLog program) that could record virtually all facets of a person's daily existence (via sensors, microphones and wearable cameras), to be dumped into gigantic databases, searchable to detect behavior patterns that might be useful to the military. A Pentagon spokesman said not to be alarmed, that only consenting subjects would be used, but one privacy advocate told Wired magazine that LifeLog could be "TIA cubed," referring to the previously revealed Total Information Awareness program, which would track everyone's purchase transactions and computer usage.

-- A February BBC report noted the fascination among tribes in Meghalaya, India, to appear mischievously worldly by giving their children prominent Western names (such as those of candidates in the Feb. 26 local elections, Adolf Lu Hitler R Marak, Tony Curtis, Rockefeller Momin and Hilarious Dhkar). Also popular are Roosevelt, Churchill, Bush, Blair, Clinton and Saddam.

-- Officials in Saudi Arabia recently began to campaign against the culture of intrafamily marriage, which is practiced by almost half the country, according to a May New York Times dispatch. "Saudi Arabia is a living genetics laboratory," said an American researcher stationed there. Several genetic disorders have festered, but in many tribes, such disorders (attributed to God's will) have not in any way diminished the ideal of first-cousin marriages.

-- In February, a 6-month-old girl was married in a Hindu ceremony in a village in southern Nepal, according to an Agence France-Presse report. Her cradle-robbing husband is 3, and their farming-cast families feared that if the children didn't tie the knot then, each one's marriage prospects would diminish as they got older.

-- From a religious advice column in Arab News (an English-language daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia), 5-9-03: "(Question:) A person feels very uncomfortable during prayers because he gets recurrent thoughts that he might have discharged wind (during the prayers, and thus) invalidated the ablution." "And it is all without sound or smell." "(Answer:) (A) wind discharge is ascertained by sound or smell. If neither is present, then no wind discharge has taken place (and therefore the ablution has not been invalidated)."

-- In May, a priest of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Parma, Ohio, Monsignor Robert V. Yarnovitz, pleaded no contest to indecency charges for an incident at a conference in nearby Huron Township. According to police, Yarnovitz was wandering, drunk and pantsless, through the Sawmill Creek resort and when confronted by police, he repeatedly and aggressively answered their every question by uttering "Michael" and a slang phrase commanding someone to perform oral sex on him. (A spokesman at Yarnovitz's church said the incident "was not characteristic of Monsignor.")

Nancy Fortson Reynolds, 49, pleaded guilty in May to having embezzled more than $1 million from an Athens, Ga., animal vaccine manufacturer during the five years she handled the company's accounts payable. According to a police detective, Reynolds and her husband spent all of the money on a multitude of consumer products, making only one enduring capital expenditure: constructing an addition onto their double-wide mobile home.

Last year's edition of the Washington, D.C., public school system's standardized-test guide for elementary students was such a disaster of errors and typos that the new edition was anticipated to be a showcase of near-perfection. However, some critics told The Washington Post in April that this year's guide was even more embarrassing. For example, one question, featuring an image of nine flowers, asks the student to count them out, but the only multiple-choice answers available were numbers between 22 and 30. Another contained only this information: If 234 people saw a theater's first show, and 456 saw a theater's second show, how many people saw both shows?

In a 2002 story, News of the Weird mentioned Cuba's Guinness-Book-record milk-producing cow, Ubre Blanca. In April 2003, a German newspaper profiled Susan Schulze, 31, of Leipzig, who the paper said was the country's most prolific milk-producing human, having provided 50 gallons of her breast milk (collected in four to six daily sessions for more than a year) to a children's clinic at the University of Magdeburg.

Barbara Schwarz is history's most prolific filer of Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a May profile in The Salt Lake Tribune. Schwarz says she is a daughter of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and a granddaughter of President Eisenhower and said she endured a number of kidnappings and mind control and microchip-implanting procedures in her quest to learn the whereabouts of her alleged husband, whom Schwarz said disappeared after he was charged with murdering Barbara Schwarz (yes, the same one). She has, said the Tribune, "carpet-bombed" "every" federal agency with "thousands" of FOIA requests, followed by "dozens" of follow-up lawsuits (one containing 2,307 pages, naming 3,087 defendants).

A 36-year-old man was tackled by customers after he had robbed the Zions Bank in Salt Lake City shortly after it opened on May 2. Several customers had had their eyes on him after they had seen him waiting outside for the bank to open but already wearing a hooded sweatshirt and mask, and the man meekly waited in a bank line for his turn before snatching money from a teller. And serial killer Robert Maury had his appeal turned down by the California Supreme Court in April. He had claimed that the Shasta County "secret witness" program should have concealed his identity when he called a hotline with crime tips, including the whereabouts of three murder victims, but police photographed him when he came by to collect his reward, and eventually he was convicted of those three murders.

Last Words: (1) Jackson Thomas was stabbed to death in May in Brooklyn, N.Y.; he had made comments about his wife's putting on weight, leading to an argument, provoking her to grab a knife, but Mr. Thomas advanced on her, saying, "What are you going to do, stab me?" (2) And a week before that, in West Hempstead, N.Y., taxicab passenger Kenneth Hill, 39, died after the driver hit him with a tire iron; he had been chased by the driver after he tried to skip out on a $5 fare and continued to taunt the driver, saying, "I'm not going to pay you, and there is nothing you can do about it."

A deputy governor in Japan resigned after criticism that he had continued to play a pachinko pinball gambling machine for a half-hour after a chaotic, magnitude-7 earthquake hit a few days earlier (on a day in which he was actually the acting governor) (Akita prefecture). Cockfight breeders filed a lawsuit against the federal government claiming that new restrictions on transporting fighting chickens constitute illegal ethnic discrimination against Cajuns and Hispanics (New Orleans). A gas station booth was rammed by a car with a dead man at the wheel; the man had shot himself to death hours before with the engine idling, and rigor motris caused his foot finally to either fall off the brake or hit the accelerator (Boston).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- An obscure California law makes it shockingly easy for anyone to anonymously force a motorist into a formal hearing over his driving skills, according to a May story in the Southern California newspaper OC Weekly. The Department of Motor Vehicles said the so-far-underused law was designed to allow relatives of diminished-skill elderly drivers to ease them off the road, but that the legislation places no limits on who can use it. Any complaint, even a bogus one with no proof, leads to a formal hearing at DMV with license suspension a possible outcome, and DMV says it must enforce the law unless the legislature changes it.

-- May marked the debut of Minnesota's gun-carry law, whose critics complained that it is much easier on handgun-possession than even Texas' law. Licensees may carry guns openly in any parking lot in the state (except federal facilities), including school parking lots (although possession of a knife in a school parking lot is still a felony). Guns are still prohibited on other school property, but the law reduces licensees' penalty for that from a felony to a misdemeanor. Private establishments can prohibit guns, but only with a state-dictated sign at each entrance, and then the "penalty" for violation is to be told to leave.

-- New Product Launches: "Purring Kitty" software that makes Nokia cell phones vibrate continuously to create a "discreet massager" (according to the British firm, Vibrelet). A healing stone that when heated, is a smell-remover, a sterilizer, and a treatment for heart disease (according to the developer, the government of North Korea). A fashionable but electrically charged woman's anti-assault coat, with rubber lining and vinyl outer layer sandwiching 9-volt circuitry that, when armed, delivers a finger-in-a-wall-socket-type jolt to anyone who touches it (from Advanced Research Apparel). And the 4-year-old, but recently trendy, half-inch, gold-enameled good-luck charm in the shape of curled feces (from Ryukodo of Kyoto, Japan).

-- "We figured that (every small business) obviously worth doing is already being done by 50 other guys in Miami, so we had to do some thinking first," said "Anton" to the Miami New Times in April. That thinking resulted in Anton's belief that "thousands" of people would pay a dollar each to view his (and his partner "Frank"'s) painstakingly created display of exactly 1 million toothpicks. After hundreds of hours of counting and banding the picks, the two men were at last word ready to look at venues and marketing proposals.

-- While the average chief executive of a $2.7 million, not-for-profit organization is paid just over $100,000, the swimming coach who is head of the De Anza Cupertino Aquatics program in California's Silicon Valley last year earned over $350,000, according to an April report in the San Jose Mercury News. The CEO-coach Pete Raykovich took over the program (training swimmers, from toddlers through internationally competitive athletes) when it was small and gets 10 percent of revenues plus a salary of $85,000, and the board of directors appears to have no regrets about Raykovich's pay.

-- Lawrence Omansky was arrested in April in New York City and charged with kidnapping business partner Lawrence Schlosser, who had criticized Omansky's property management work at a meeting in Omansky's office in the TriBeCa section of Manhattan. Allegedly, during the meeting, Omansky bound Schlosser and forced him into a 3-foot-high crawl space under the second floor, where Schlosser remained for 28 hours before untaping himself and escaping. Said Omansky's lawyer, "The case will ultimately be viewed as a business dispute."

-- Doctors at Chimkent (Kazakhstan) Children's Hospital told the BBC in April that they had removed a fetus from a 7-year-old boy; it was thought at first to be a cyst but when removed, actually had hair and bones and is now believed to have been the boy's Siamese twin that grew in the wrong place. And in May, Groote Schnuur Hospital (Cape Town, South Africa) reported only the 15th documented case of a fetus developing in the mother's liver (and the fourth to survive).

-- Curator Mark Norman of Australia's Melbourne Museum revealed in January that he had captured and photographed the male of the world's most sexually unequal species. When the blanket octopus male (2 cm long) mates with the female (6 feet long), it uses a special extension arm to transfer sperm from its penis (after which the male dies). Females, which may weigh 10,000 times as much as the males, are typically found with several such extension arms lodged inside them.

The world did not end on May 15, contrary to warnings by Japan's 1,200-member Pana Wave Laboratory cult, whose public activities (covering themselves and their property in white sheets for protection against electromagnetic waves beamed by "communists") had drawn media attention just before "doomsday." The Pana Wavers are believed not to be dangerous, although one member said that if the group's guru, Ms. Yuko Chino, soon succumbs to her (supposedly) microwave-induced cancer, the cult will, in revenge, exterminate "all humankind."

At the May court hearing in Nashville, Tenn., for Denza D. McGee, 19, accused of fatally shooting a man, McGee's buddy Gerald Cunningham, 23, showed up to give moral support. However, the witness who was in court to identify McGee said she also recognized Cunningham as McGee's partner in the home invasion and shooting, and Cunningham was pulled out of the gallery and arrested.

As reported in News of the Weird in March 2002 (to apparently many skeptical readers), the 37-year-old female inmate who died at the Pine Grove Correctional Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada, succumbed from a toxic reaction to methadone that she had consumed by drinking the vomit of a fellow inmate who was on a methadone maintenance program. A coroner's inquest in March 2003 heard witness after witness describe inmates' practice of trading their methadone-laced vomit for various inmate favors, and the two inmates who admitted vomiting for the victim have since been additionally sentenced for drug trafficking.

British circus trainer Roger Perkins stole the show at the Royal Easter Circus in April with his prize sow, Miss Piggy, who climbs a ramp to a diving tower and then free-falls into a swimming pool. And Pete Ondrus and his wife, Barb Lambert, told the Greenville, Mich., Daily News in May that they were looking forward to a summer of ballparks and fairs in which they would stage races between their favorite cow, Dusty Roads, and two other trained race cows.

Lynda Taylor, 38, was arrested in Stuart, Fla., in May and charged with aggravated assault, specifically, wearing perfume, spraying Lysol and lighting scented candles. She and her husband, David, have been having marital trouble, and David, who suffers from extreme chemical sensitivity, says Lynda is purposely trying to kill him to get his recent worker compensation settlement check.

After protests, organizers of a children's beauty pageant changed their minds and decided that their original plan to have "swimsuit" and "sexy body" categories was not a good idea (Bangkok, Thailand). A motorist drove his car into a self-service car wash hoping to drench a small fire in his engine, but by the time he realized he didn't have any coins, the fire had spread, eventually destroying four of the car wash's eight bays (West Seneca, N.Y.). A 38-year-old man attempted to dispose of gunpowder by tossing it into his lighted fireplace, resulting in burns to his head and arms (Pike Creek Valley, Del.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)